Should you warm up your car engine in winter?

Popular Mechanics and Road & Track are saying "NO!"   I say yes.  In proper cold weather, say below zero, your engine oil gets stiff and sticky.  The oil pump may be be able to force enough thick and sticky cold oil thru the engine bearings to prevent damage to the engine.  And, the defroster won't throw any heat til the engine warms up. 
   What you ought to do, is give the engine 20-30 seconds at idle to get the deep chill off it.  Then drive away gently, no foot to the floor acceleration, until the temp gauge gets up somewhere near normal, or the defroster starts throwing a little heat.   Takes a few minutes and then all is well. 
   There is no need to leave the car idling for 10-20-30 minutes before driving it, but you do want to keep your foot out of it until the engine is warm. 

The NRA counts coup

The new American Rifleman magazine, the NRA house organ, got to me today.  In it, the NRA leadership spent several pages patting themselves on the back for Donald Trump's win.  NRA backed Trump from the very beginning and are overjoyed at his win. 
   Aside from a few Democrats bad mouthing the NRA,  the MSM hasn't let out a peep about how effective they were.  Actually, the NRA has several million dues paying members,  mostly single issue, support of second amendment voters.  The NRA magazine goes to all of them.  Every election American Rifleman will have a two page center spread, listing every office in each state, from US senator down to dogcatcher, and naming all the candidates, and giving each candidate a grade, A thru F, on where they stand on the second amendment.  The membership reads the magazine and finds it highly credible, much more so than any of the MSM. 
   I'm thinking that several million motivated single issue voters swung more weight in the election than anything the Russians could even think of doing.  Funny that the MSM never writes about it.  Probably the MSM writers are all city boys who don't like guns. 

How "Identity Politics" failed Clinton

"Identity Politics" as played by Hillary, amounted to identifying some group[s], blacks, women, Hispanics, LGBT, and others, naming them, and asking them to vote for Hillary.   Some did, just being named is powerful, but many did not, because Hillary never addressed their wants and grievances.  She just asked  for the votes.  No quid pro quo.  No campaign promises. 
   In some cases, the "identity group" wants something repellent to the rest of the country.  Hispanics want easier immigration and a path to citizenship for the illegals allready in the country.  This is anathema to large number of  regular voters.  Women want free contraceptives and abortion on demand which is anathema to large numbers of voters. 
   To do "indentity politics" well, you need some genuine members of the group, leaders, come out and campaign for you.  Hillary didn't have any prominent blacks, hispanics or LGBTs on TV, calling for Hillary's election.  Actually The Donald did better in this respect.  He had Ben Carson, a highly respected black man, come out and publicly support him.
   My advice to the Democrats in the aftermath of this year's election, is to go back to political basics, come up with a party platform, that states issues, that actually mean something real to voters.   This requires some head banging within the party to accept some controversial issues.  What to do about pipelines and transmission lines, oil exploration, charter schools, taxes,  law enforcement, and more are all controversial inside the Democratic party.  One reason Hillary never campaigned on any of them is that doing so would have brought a storm of criticism down on her from the numerous opponents of each and every issue. 

Companies need to train their employees

Companies are wailing that they cannot find workers with the right skills to fill some 5 million job openings.  Stop wailing.  Hire some likely young guys (and girls).  Run 'em thru a training course, on company time and on payroll.  Flunk out a few losers, and in a few months you have all the new skilled workers you might need. 
   But, after we spend money on training them, they quit and go to work for our competitors.  That mean you aren't treating them right, not enough pay and benefits, or an unpleasant work environment (dirty dingy shop, nasty foremen, crummy hours, and other things) 
    The public schools need to teach the three Rs, reading riting, and 'rithmetic.  It's unreasonable to expect them to teach CNC machining, vapor reflow soldering, digital signal processing, use of logic analyzers, operation of bulldozers and backhoes.  This sort of specialized state of the art technology must be taught by industry, not public high school.  Let the schools teach fundamental things of use anywhere and let companies teach their special technologies. 
   Judging by the corporate whining about lack of suitably trained workers, I don't think many American companies understand this. 

What does CIA know about hacks and hacking?

Probably very little.  CIA's history is not encouraging.  They failed to predict the breakup of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.  They spent eight years attempting to destabilize the Bush administration with embarrassing leaks and the Valery Plame affair.  They  claimed the Iranians had closed down their nuclear weapons program. They failed to warn of 9/11. They still have their agents working out of US embassies.  Not an impressive record.
   Today CIA is claiming the hacks against the Democrats were done by the Russians.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Granted the Russians have the capacity, but so do a bunch of others, ranging from individuals, small groups, large groups and plenty of nation-states.   China and the NORKs have the capability and they don't like us much.  ISIS has the capability and they really don't like us.  Plus the democrats were a pretty soft target.  Word has it that Podesta was so clueless as to fall for a phish email, you know the ones that claim there is a problem with your account and you need to give us your password to make it right.  According to the Wall St Journal, the Republicans had tighter security and the hacker[s] failed to penetrate them. 
   I'd give more crediblity to the Russian theory if I heard it from some truly competent people, like Microsoft, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes or even NSA.  I used to do contract work for NSA, and NSA did have people who knew what they were doing.  I cannot say that about CIA. 

That Russian Hacking

The MSM are still talking it up.  Spreading the narrative that Hillary would have won, except for the Russians.  Sounds better than Hillary lost because of her nasty background going back 30-40 years, and she didn't promise to get the country back on the right track.  Polls from before the election showed everyone thought the country was on the wrong track.  Hillary never addressed this issue (and a lot of other issues) whereas The Donald promised to get the country back on the right track.  The voters found both candidates to be equally personally distasteful, but they all knew the country was on the wrong track, so they voted for the candidate who promised to fix things, rather than the candidate who kept saying that everything was just peachy.
   Hillary's secret server, FBI directory Comey's statements, and the leaked Podesta emails all hurt Hillary, but I don't think any of those things were decisive.  It was Hillary's frequently stated belief that the country was on the right track that convinced voters that she wasn't living in the real world. 
   But no Democrat, from Hillary on down wants to admit that, so they are puffing up the Russians were hacking story. 

The Fall of Aleppo

The fall of Aleppo to the forces of Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin is the culmination of Obama's Syria policy.  It is a horrible human catastrophe.  But it's what Obama brought us.  It's a good thing it happened on Obama's watch, since he is fully responsible for it.